The Rise of the Customer Champions

The customer champion model is a new way for test teams to systematically collect, organize, and act on customer feedback. This model helps test teams think more strategically about their overall customer connection approach, in addition to growing the test discipline in the long term. Mike Tholfsen describes how the Office OneNote test team employed innovative customer connection techniques to improve product quality and customer satisfaction during the Microsoft Office 2007 release. Mike will also talk about how the Office "14" development team brought together test customer champions across forty client, server, service, and shared teams to ensure there is a unified Office voice when gathering user feedback and customer data. Mike describes and demonstrates the four key pillars of this new customer champion model--creating the customer encyclopedia, making the right resource investments, writing better customer commitments, and building the champion discipline.

• Ways for testers to explore customer connections
• Methods to map customer connection activities to specific tester goals, objectives, and commitments
• How the Microsoft Office test group uses the Test Customer Champion model